A flying palace: A private A380 with all the bells and whistles…

Imagine a 3- floor Airbus A380 with a private concert hall, a flying garage to park your Royce or Maybach, and a Turkish bath on separate floors. I’d name it a flying palace though you could call it by any other name.

Word has it that a member of the Saudi Royal family is going to get one of these 0.5 billion USD luxury birds soon, to be able to retire their B747 they use right now. The Airbus airframe, with a list price of about USD 370 million, is being modified with expensive fittings of USD 170 million by the UK based design firm DesignQ, who helped Virgin Atlantic design the Upper Class Suite.

The private jet will have a garage in the lowest floor where cars can be parked after driving up to the plane on the tarmac. From there, an elevator will emerge from the bottom of the plane, to pick up the owner of the plane.

The cargo hold (aka belly), will be converted into a wellness zone, where a lightweight Turkish bath for 4 people will be one of the highlights, but you can always choose between various other spa treatments to suit your mood. The wellbeing room will have a magic carpet floor, which will be projecting on the floor all that you are flying above. And to add the 4th Dimension to this, you also get the smell perspective … so trees when overflying a forest, and maybe car smoke when overflying a city?

One flight of stairs up, a concert hall will open up with a baby grand piano, and a stage, with seating for 10 people. Big names will be hosted on this flight of fancy. Next door is the boardroom, where holographic screens will display share prices. A huge perspex table with touch screens will allow people to ‘join’ the meeting and be projected into the room if they please. In flight internet and phones are a given.

The top storey will have 5 fabulous private quarters for the family, each with their own bathroom and shower, and a praying room which will have the praying mats point to the Mecca by interacting with the GPS. For guests on the plane, there will be Guest Staterooms which can accomodate up to 20 guests in first class style.

The bird should be ready to fly next year. Now although it does not accrue miles to my mileage account, I’d be still happy to join on as a guest on the maiden flight, or the one after, or the one after… since I don’t have enough money in the pocket to buy this (forget this, any airplanes yet!). But someday, I’ll take 2!

Illustration courtesy the Daily Mail (Click for enlarged version)

PS: You should also take a look at this article from the Daily Mail, 2009 when this plane first got talked about!